This poor soul never received proper justice!
While scrolling through the newsfeed that day, a picture of a small fairy-like girl came to the fore, and another picture of her shattered next to it. Most of the news that comes to my newsfeed are rape stories, so after seeing the picture of the beautiful girl, I was just hoping that there would be no bad news there.
I'm sorry but it was a rape case and was considered one of the most heinous murders in the world. My hands and feet were shaking while reading it, I realised it was a brutal incident, and to read the whole thing that happened to the innocent soul was not possible for normal people.
Junko Furuta was a Japanese girl who was kidnapped, raped and tortured for 44 days at the age of 17. The last 44 days of her life are literally spent in hell. She had been sexually and physically harassed for no reason. Yes for refusing to go on a date with a low ranking Yakuza guy. If I hadn't read it, I wouldn't have known that just because someone refuses to go on a date can be raped and killed in this horrific way.
After kidnapping her, She was forced to call her home to say that she had run away with someone and told her parents to stop the investigation. Every day for these days she had been raped and physically abused. Various foreign objects were inserted in her female organ, fire set on her legs multiple times. Before being killed the kidnappers beat her with various objects and hung her on the ceiling and used her as a punching bag until her internal organs got damaged.
The descriptions of the atrocities committed against Junko are so horrific that they are beyond belief. I spent hour after hour on the internet looking for some authentic sources to be sure that this murder actually happened. This heartbreaking story, this murder kept me awake for many nights, and whenever I remembered it I feel suffocated.
As per a few reports, the young lady was raped more than 400 times by an unknown number of individuals. The wrongdoing was seen by a hundred people who stayed silent and became accessories to this ghastliness. After killing her they put Junko in an oil drum full of wet cement.
Do you know what punishment was given to Junko's killer?
Two years after the gruesome murder, on July 20, 1990, the sentences were passed. Hiroshi Miyano, the group leader, was sentenced to 20 years in jail, the maximum sentence before life imprisonment. Jō Ogura got 8 years in juvenile jail. Nobuharu Minato and Yasushi Watanabe got 5–9 years and 5–7 years, separately. Most of the others who were involved in the rape were neither found nor tried by Japanese Court. Now all the murderers are out of jail. They have changed their identities and are living a normal life.
Unfortunately, those beasts are still alive. The killers were not hanged because the case was tried in juvenile court. Under the delinquency law, Junko's killers were released after serving only a few years in prison. The punishment of just a few years in jail is by no means enough and cannot be justified in any way.
Japanese Juvenile law says that if a minor who was in that age category at the time of the crime is convicted of an offense that would be considered a capital crime for an adult offender, the minor should be given life imprisonment instead of the death penalty, but the killers didn't get life imprisonment.
These beasts made that choice and tortured her with free will and used her body for simple pleasure. These monsters need to be removed from society permanently. But the main goal of Japan's juvenile law is to rehabilitate and support juvenile delinquents and reintegrate them into society. Maybe that's why the court considered it more important to rehabilitate the most heinous murderers than to bring the victim to justice in this case.
A law should be effective, should ensure justice for the victim. This is what can be expected from a law. Even if there was no death penalty for such a heinous crime, they could have changed their law at least to punish these heinous murderers. It's been 30 years but the poor soul never received proper justice. Here, the juvenile law failed to serve its purpose. It is a great shame for Japan that it's law could not give maximum punishment to the perpetrators of such a brutal killing.
